The Happening (2008)
The Happening (2008) 4/10
I can almost remember a time when i anticipated an M. Night Shyamalan film. It was after i had watched THE SIXTH SENSE (9/10) which happens to be one of my favourite films ever. But Shyamalan’s career after Sixth Sense has been almost a freefall trajectory. His made a couple of decent movies: UNBREAKABLE (6/10), SIGNS (7/10) before really losing it in a succession of duds: THE VILLAGE (3/10), LADY IN THE WATER (3/10). The good news is that THE HAPPENING is a slight improvement over Village and Lady in the water. The bad new is that it still sucks. To be fair, Shyamalan’s film begins quite well with a hook: people are mysteriously driven to kill themselves. The first maybe 20-30mins of the film sets up the plot well. Unfortunately, the plot quickly descends into ridiculousness and almost laughable attempts to create tension. To wit, Shymalan tries to convince us that the trees, the plants and the wind are scary. He fails miserably, and the effect is almost laughably comic. If he was aiming for paranoia, then he has failed totally because there is hardly any tension in the limp plot. Maybe a skilled director like say Alfred Hitchcock could pull it of and make the wind into a scary antagonist. But Shyamalan is no Hitchcock and the entire dramatic tension of THE HAPPENING is lukewarm at best and more often than not its laughably lame. The other weakness is the casting, because Mark Whalberg is mediocre and Zoey Deschanel is utterly forgettable. The script also spouts some incredibly lame dialogue and the film more or less goes off the rails once the protaganist seriously believes that the plants are trying to kill us!
With a total lack of logic and not even a decent twist, the film limps along to its underwhelming conclusion. Shyamalan continues his downward spiral with yet another dud.
